- Back to: Sonic the Hedgehog 3 (prototype; 1993-11-03)/Comparisons.
Act 1
Sonic and Tails do not launch out of the snow at the beginning of the Act. They start standing on top of it.
The background uses a different palette, featuring a pink sky, darker supports and a green Death Egg. Though it was changed in the final, the different palette would still persist in the Data Select icon:
Flybot767s have a different palette.
The prototype won't let the player jump off the bottom of the spinning drums. Instead of moving downwards, Sonic and Tails will jump upwards and land on the drum further up.
Sonic and Tails can jump "past" the spinning lifts and get stuck (or crushed, depending on which lift it is).
The first spinning lift encountered won't send Tails to his exclusive route yet.
Orbinauts do not change direction to look at Sonic, which means it's easier to drive them into walls. They also have an incorrect palette. The spinning teacup lift to the left is also at a lower position.
This spinning teacup stops a little lower than usual. The final adds a Ribot in front of the player, and changes the static sideways spikes to moving ones pointing upwards.
This spinning teacup is too low for Sonic to pass under it, though Tails can. The Invincibility monitor to the right was later changed to a Lightning Shield (and Sonic 3 & Knuckles would revert it back to an Invincibility).
This room, accessible via door switch, had its Invincibility changed to a Water Shield in the final.
The starting positions of moving floor platforms like this one are a little bit lower to the bottom of the slope...
...which results in them disappearing when walked off at the top of the slope due to being too far away from their starting positions. This leads to a bug where Sonic and Tails' vertical positions will be locked until they stand on another object. As a result, the starting positions of these platforms were changed to prevent this.
There is no Star Post here. The Rings are also further to the left.
There is a spring here that bounces the player backwards into an Orbinaut, which can be seen as unfair object placement. The final removes the spring and embeds the spinning teacup lift into the floor.
The monitors hidden beneath the indoor spinning drum are a Super Ring and a 1-UP here. The final changes these to Water and Lightning Shields.
Graphics and palettes start corrupting when Eggman and Knuckles arrive on the scene.
The tower and the end of the Act does not collapse so the screen locks in place. However, the player can get past this by making Tails move to the right with the second control pad.
Twin Hammer loads without a boss theme. You fight it in the same place as the final game, but there are two obtrusive pipe systems in the floor, which when entered move Sonic and Tails above one of two boxes.
If the player gets hit during this battle and lands in the tube entrance, it counts as a pit death.
Dying just causes the the area to load as if the player has reached it through edit mode - devoid of bosses, and with an empty void on the right hand side.
Defeating Twin Hammer causes the second Act to load, but the player is sped right through a broken version of the Act to where Knuckles is standing. The music changes, and the player will fall to the floor and die (although Act 2 will load properly afterwards).
Knuckles' boss area doesn't have a Star Post, Rings or a switch door here.
Interestingly, the prototype has more of the beginning of Knuckles' Act 2 placed after where Act 1 ends even though the player is not supposed to see it normally. The final removes some of the level chunks, but leaves the spring.
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Act 2
Sonic and Tails do not have a dedicated underwater palette.
Weird red foreground tiles can be found dotted around the stage where animated tiles should be.
A chunk of the ceiling here was removed in the final, sending the player towards the spring.
The top part of the sky is always corrupted in this build. If the player restarts the level from a Star Post near the top boundary, the sky will appear normal as it should, but will corrupt once the player comes within proximity of the water.
The player has to get past moving spikes to proceed downward from here, and they can take damage from the spikes even when they are retracted into the wall. Obviously this is unfair design, so it was redesigned, adding a Ribot and a Flybot767 to compensate. The fire spitters following it are a little closer together here, too.
To get into the room containing the door switch, the player must avoid moving spikes. The final replaces the spikes with two Eggman Marks.
Spikes would be added to this room to make it more dangerous.
This entire section is different in that a Speed Booster catapults the player through a speed section. The final cuts down on some of the speed and adds a teacup lift.
This spinning teacup is supposed to spin out of control and launch the player to the right, but it doesn't do it properly - it stops after reaching the bottom, and spins out of control when the player rides it back to its original position, immediately disappearing at the frame it's supposed to detach at.
The game swaps out the main level assets for those of the Death Egg when a certain X coordinate has been reached, which is typically after defeating the Ball Shooter, but there is no check for the player's Y coordinate, which leads to the procedure happening in the top-most routes of the Act (which are set above the boss areas) when it shouldn't, and as a consequence the player will fall down and die.
The Ball Shooter's support and door sprites overlap one of the foreground tiles.
The Ball Shooter's door opens from the top rather than from the bottom.
It only takes one hit to destroy the Ball Shooter instead of the usual eight, likely for testing purposes. The camera's Y positions are also unlocked after destroying it.
The Egg Mobile is raised off the ground, and the game doesn't do anything to stop the player from jumping over it and killing themselves.
Knuckles is standing on circular boss door parts rather than red girders. When he loads in, the background breaks. He also doesn't chuckle between hitting the Egg Mobile and falling off.
The Egg Mobile stops moving and the game soft-locks before reaching the area where Sonic and Tails would fight Beam Rocket and Big Arm. The Death Egg doesn't even move or set off tremors, either.
Knuckles' route in Act 2 has had some work to it by this point as plenty of its object placement is there, but a few things are missing like all of the girders and their accompanying Ribots, with this section as an example.
The background for Knuckles' route has a glitched chunk that appears every so often near the bottom level boundary.
The spinning drum in Knuckles' route is non-functional.
And neither are the water pipes that Knuckles would enter in.
A switch door, a spinning teacup and a fire spitter are missing from here.
The final Sonic 3 would swap out these three Rings with a Knuckles-only wall in the rising water section (Sonic 3 & Knuckles would get rid of the wall later on).
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